My Mother Tells Everyone I'm a Writer. I'm Trying.
Her faith in me is a deadline I keep extending.
My mother introduced me to her dentist as a writer while I had a suction tube in my mouth and no legal way to object. By the time the cotton came out, he wanted to know when the book was coming.
There is no book... There has never been a book. There is a folder on my laptop called BOOK, which contains nine openings, four outlines, and a file named chapter-one-FINAL-actually-final that I have not opened since March, because opening it means admitting the finality was aspirational.
But try telling my mother that. In her version, I am not a customer support agent who writes before her shift. I am a writer who happens to do customer support, the way a spy holds a cover job: temporarily, and with dignity.
She has been telling people for eleven years.
She told the neighbor with the marigolds. She told the man who came to repair the washing machine, who nodded politely and asked if the drum made noise on spin. She told a stranger at my cousin's wedding, a videographer, who then pointed his camera at me and asked me to say something poetic for the couple.
I panicked and quoted a shampoo advertisement. He kept it in the final cut. My family still performs it at gatherings, complete with my exact terrified pause.
For most of my twenties, her introductions felt like invoices. Every "my daughter, the writer" was a bill arriving for something I had not finished paying off. I would smile, deflect, and later sit in the car with my forehead on the steering wheel, doing the math on how many more years a person can plausibly be "working on something."
There is a family WhatsApp group called The Family (Official), where she forwards sunrise images and, once, memorably, a two-line caption I had written under a photo of my breakfast, presented to forty relatives as "my daughter's latest work." An uncle replied, "Deep." Another asked if it was for sale. I muted the group for a month, and she took the silence as evidence that I was busy writing.
The worst part was that she never asked to read anything.
She just believed.
Belief without evidence is either faith or madness, and she had decided, apparently at my birth, which one hers was.
I tried to lower her expectations once. Over tea I said, "Ma, most writers never publish a book. Statistically." She stirred her cup and said, "Statistically, most mothers are wrong about their children. I am not most mothers." Then she asked if I wanted toast. You cannot argue with a woman who follows prophecy with toast.
So I kept extending the deadline. Next year... After this job settles. After the wedding season. After I finish the online course I bought at midnight from a writing academy and abandoned at lesson four. Her faith renewed itself automatically, like a subscription I could not cancel and secretly did not want to.
Then, last winter, I went looking for the spare pressure cooker gasket in the steel cupboard in her bedroom, the one that has held the same objects in the same positions since 1994.
Under the wedding albums, wrapped in a cotton blouse piece, was a notebook. Brown cover, water stain shaped like a country that does not exist. Her maiden name in the corner, in handwriting younger than mine.
Poems. Forty, maybe fifty of them.
Dated 1976 to 1981. Small ones about rain on a hostel window, a long one about her father's transistor radio, one about a man who was definitely not my father. The last poem stopped in the middle of a line, mid-image, as if someone had called her from another room... and the room had lasted forty years.
I sat on the bedroom floor and read every page twice. The suction tube feeling came back, that specific silence of wanting to speak and being prevented by something clinical. Outside, the pressure cooker I had come to fix went on not whistling.
When I asked her about the notebook, she did not look embarrassed. She looked at it the way you look at an old classmate spotted across a crowded market. "I wrote those before," she said. "Before what?" "Before everything else."
"Why did you stop?" I asked. She gave the shrug that carries a dowry, three house moves, two children, and one husband with firm opinions about practical careers. "Nobody was waiting for them," she said. "It felt like cooking for a house where nobody was hungry."
Nobody ever stood in a waiting room and called her a writer, so she stood in every waiting room and called me one.
The pride I had spent a decade treating as pressure was actually inheritance.
She was not billing me. She was forwarding me something she never got to open herself.
That night I did the thing I had rehearsed and postponed for years. I had once read an essay on why safe poems lose, and I finally understood it was never really about poems. I took the least safe thing I had ever written, the one about her hands, the one I kept private because every line of it was true, and entered it into a monthly poetry contest before I could talk myself down. Then I typed up three of her rain poems and saved them in the folder called BOOK, which at last contained something honest.
The results came a month later... I did not win. I placed somewhere on the longlist, in the paragraph of names nobody screenshots.
I screenshotted it.
She has it printed on the fridge, under a magnet from Haridwar, positioned so that guests cannot miss it on their way to the water jug.
"Longlisted," she tells everyone now, in the exact tone other mothers say "doctor."
These days we write on Sunday mornings, which is a grand way of saying she dictates corrections to her own forty-year-old lines while I type, and we argue about whether the transistor radio poem needs a sadder ending. She says no. She says she has already lived the sad endings, and now she is only interested in the hopeful kind, the ones you write when the waiting is finally over.
Last Sunday she read a stanza out loud, stopped, and said, quietly, "This is good." Not mine... Hers. It was the first compliment I have ever heard her give herself, and it took four decades, a blouse piece, and a borrowed notebook to arrive.
People ask me sometimes if the pressure of a parent's pride is heavy.
It is. So is a blanket in winter.
I am still trying. The book is still mostly a folder. But the deadline feels different now, less like a bill and more like a table set for two.
On that table, most Sunday mornings: her notebook, my laptop, and two cups of coffee going cold between us, because some things matter more than drinking them hot.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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